A Short Walk in the Cemetery

It may sound odd to American ears, but my favorite place in Leicester to go take a walk is the Welford Road Cemetery. It lies directly across the street from campus, and my train runs by its opposite side.

In Texas, cemeteries are great open swathes of land, baking in the sun, with gravestones spread out in geometric rows on bald, blanched grass. They have main gates and wire fences, and no one ever goes there unless they have sad business. This seems to me a terrible way to inter the dead and to display the humanity of their past and the reality of their faith.

In the UK, cemeteries are old and half-overgrown, tumble-down gardens of green, with trees and vines and grand, black-shaded angels of stone peeping out from under weathered wings. A casual observer can wander in them at will, reading names and dates, imagining the vast history and impact of each human life, wondering endlessly how many souls around you are singing in heaven (or not, I suppose. But that is sad). In cemeteries, you can meet people named Hephzibah...which is a feat not to be accomplished anywhere else in the modern world (albeit, perhaps for good reason). You also meet a good many Charleses, Elizabeths, Jameses, Annes, and so forth. 

When I stopped on the way back from ballet last Saturday, there were snow drops growing all over the graveyard, looking so springy.

It was also very sunny and lovely in general - my first real taste of not-winter!!

Below, looking from the graveyard toward the tower in which I have all of my classes:

Some of the stones and monuments speak Christ's hope back to the living:

This one above reads, at the bottom, "I know that my Redeemer liveth," and I always hear it sung to me the way Handel set it.

Overtime, I have developed some favorite graves. There is a lady named Isaline, which is unconventional and lovely.

There is also another one which I walk past almost every time, though I refrain from posting a picture because it belongs to a modern and still-living family, not to the 1800's. It is a family grave, and just in the middle of the names is a little girl named Emma, who died at only 5 years old. Her grandmother's name follows after her own, which twists my heart every time. It sounds so sad, but the family has filled in the area in front of the headstone with bright silk flowers and toys. There are figurines and fairies, puppets and bunnies and kitties, pinwheels and peonies and pansies, and it looks like a child's fairy garden, only briefly paused in play, and soon to be resumed. Emma, were she alive, would be 26 today, but in an odd way, her beautiful kindergartener's playground in the peaceful green of Welford Road is almost completely happy.

And, lastly, I share two pictures of my all-time favorite grave in the cemetery. I rather look forward to meeting the members of this family one day, in the glorified bodies in which we both believe!

Read closer, now:

So sure, I spend time in a cemetery. But, I always leave singing Easter joy.

In Britain I Shall Be

Well, it does seem to be mid-way through August, and this means that I am facing fairly imminent departure for England! 

This shall once again become a sort of travel or study abroad blog, as I prepare for my 10 months or so pursuing my Masters degree in Victorian Studies at the University of Leicester, UK. I learned today that Leicester is in the region of England called the East Midlands, or, for you non-Anglophiles, pretty much smack dab in the middle of central England. I've heard it's not far from the Lake District of Coleridge-and-Wordsworthian fame, so at some point I definitely intend to make a stop there.

(In passing, isn't Wordsworth the most exceptionally apt name for a poet?)

In preparation for my English experience, I've been straightening out quite a bit of paperwork and beginning to assemble a packing list. When I went abroad to Belgium and briefly to Scotland before, I quickly learned that, to a native Texan, 

all of Europe only has one temperature: cold. It's really only a matter of cold or colder, or perhaps of utterly frigid, as in Bruges in February. I do not, in any other case, lump the entirety of the British Isles and the Continent into one indistinguishable unit, but I am operating on the assumption that the weather in any and all of the above is what I would consider to be winter, year-round. The unfortunate implication of this is that I must pack more sweaters than ever I cared to own, and the unfortunate fact about this is that sweaters take up room. If one wanted to study abroad with optimal luggage space, a tropical destination would certainly be the way to go!

On the whole, of course, I suspect the sweaters will be quite worth the effort,  when I start my year delving deep into the lives of the Victorians while based on their own proper turf. The biggest drawback at this point is that I am almost preemptively lonely for my dear friends and family! 10 months will pass so quickly, yet right now there are also ways in which it seems nearly interminable. To my lovely readers and world-wide supporters, your prayers are requested for my sanity in preparation, my safety in travel, and my sentimentality for my loved ones at all times.